The publications referred to below and used for elucidating the background of the invention and the state of the art are to be viewed as being incorporated into the description of the invention presented below.
By “tissue” is meant herein both hard tissue (bone, tooth and cartilage) and soft tissue. A supportive tissue may be a hard tissue or soft tissue structure, such as a tendon, connective tissue or ligament.
Materials tested and used for the reconstruction of supportive tissue, in particular bone tissue, include calcium phosphate based materials made, for example, from bovine bone, hydroxyapatite prepared by chemical methods, calcium phosphate, tri-calcium phosphate, coral-based hydroxyapatites, bioactive glasses, metals or metal alloys (e.g. titanium or vitallium), a large group of polymers, and bone tissue itself, either the patient's own bone (autograft) or bank bone (allograft) (Aho & Heikkilä 1997). There are adverse effects associated with all of these materials because of the complicated manufacturing process of the material, unsatisfactory strength of the material, its cumbersome handling property or its unsatisfactory workability, or potential risk of contagious disease. There has been a search for a material which would not have the above-mentioned adverse effects and which would additionally correspond to bone tissue by its structure and resilience and be easily workable. By workability is meant in particular the shaping of a piece, sawing, carving and drilling of the material, and the attaching of the piece at its targeted site. The workability of the known materials mentioned above is unsatisfactory. Furthermore, they are brittle and prone to break.
In 1997 there was published in the literature, in the form of an abstract, a report on experimentation with wood, i.e. juniper, in rabbit bone (Gross et al., 1997). The juniper wood used in this experimentation was, however, in no manner pre-treated.